Winter 2020

Watergate & Mugwumps

Watergate & Mugwumps

As a former Connecticut resident who voted against Lowell Weicker, I was particularly fascinated by his conduct during the first phase of the Watergate hearings, and by the favorable impression he made among liberal commentators. No one seems to remember his race against Joseph Duffey in 1970, the year of Spiro Agnew’s exhortations against radical liberals and the sinister forces behind them. While the Vice-President called Duffey a “revisionist Marxist”—a category even more ominous than radical liberal—Weicker worked hard to identify with the Administration. Having been chairman of the Americans for Democratic Action and a supporter of the notorious Eugene McCarthy, Duffey proved particularly vulnerable to innuendo. To the best of my recollection, as the saying goes, Weicker never publicly criticized Agnew’s tactics; like the men he recently interrogated, he preferred to look the other way.